Education and the Elastic Mind

Over the past twenty-five years, people have experienced dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration.

Education and the Elastic Mind site explores the reciprocal relationship between design and education by bringing together concepts and objects that combine research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations.

This site highlights designers’ (this means that educators are seen as, and operate as designers of relational teaching and learning environments, what James Gee terms, SMART Worlds) ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into social objects and gestures that people can understand, use and recreate.

> REVIEWIT

> N-Gage, the practice

> References

> Credits

Thinkering	This is a culture in which experimentation is guided by engagement with the world and open, constructive collaboration with colleagues and other specialists. Whether in the form of web development, teaching, or growth and aggregation, thinkering gives shape to the dialogue between design (art), and science. Many scientists, artists and educators have turned to design to give method to their creative processes. What John Seely Brown has called "thinkering" or what Bourdieu termed "bricolage".
Complex Response Processes of Human Relating and Activity Theory	Activity Theory recognises that the activities that people engage with determines what tools, and data will be used. It is essential that designeres know the activites, skills, tools they are designeing with and into (not that these are seperate enties rather they are interconnected through siturated practice and the use of blended learning practices). Provide Example Complex Response Processes of Human Relating. Ralph Stacey, a predominate thinker on Complex Responsive Processes supports this multi-way creation of knowledge when he states that “Knowledge is not a “thing”, or a system, but an ephemeral, active process of relating. If one takes this view, then no one, let alone a corporation, can own knowledge. Knowledge it self can not be stored, not can intellectual capital be measured, and certainly neither can be managed. Multi-activity
People and Objects	Design has expanded into new fields, including the interactions between people and objects. Responsive design, features objects that respond to our needs rather than awaiting our instructions or delivery option. The tagging of information in our environment makes the world into a live information platform. New interfaces incorporate instinctive human traits, expanding our relationships with the objects they enable us to access. Examples here are: wii console which tracks movement; The Learning Federation (TLF) and Learning Objects see Reviewit site and what is new - Imagine beign able to access the renewed NTCF on an IWB as educators design relational teaching and learning environments
Distributed Learning
Design for Debate	Design for Debate is a new type of practice that devises ways to discuss the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies by presenting not only artifacts, but also the quizzical scenarios that go with them.
Visualisation	We live in an age when information is more prolific and widely available than ever before. To organise and visualise it, is to start to understand it. I often hear concerns around the vaste number of social network sites (globally, thousands are created per minute), and how they jostle for attention etc...."how can we cope, control etc" This is "old mind-set" thinking. Shift thinking here to the awareness that these sites are ways of organising and understanding information. Further, these sites are linked into social networks - they create nodes of information flow that people tap into to make sense of our world.
Thought to Action	Designers work to envision not just objects, but also the gestures that inform the design, implementation and distribution process. What are the new behavioral rules that inform the future of design forms and capabilities?.
Relational Teaching and Learning Environments and SMART Worlds All Together Now!	Relational Teaching and Learning Environments SMART Worlds is a term coined by Prof James Gee to describe relational teaching and learning environments in which objects, tools, and the environment are co-learners with and mentors to humans. Digital technologies lead to new ways with words, knowing, and learning, and therefore offer opportunities for new social and cultural practices. N-GAGE, an example of a SMART World All Together Now! explores the modulations of the relationship between individuals and the collective sphere. The "Big Ideas" on what skills and understandings are important in the 21st Century and beyond and how this is needed to be reflected in any Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment material.